GATT, GULF WAR OFFER LEGACY OF HOPE

David Warsh, Boston GlobeCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Amid the sorrow of an unexpectedly long recession-the longest in America since World War II-it is important to remember why 1991 will go into the history books as a year of extraordinary promise. Never mind the unwinding of the Soviet Union, itself pretty remarkable. Forget for the moment the knitting-together of Europe into a still-more prosperous whole.

Take the events that began and ended 1991: the Persian Gulf war in January and the windup of the working sessions of the 108-nation GATT talks on world trade in December.

Together, these evolutions in the direction of global federalism are potent symbols of the emergence of a world ruled more by law and reason and less by force and dark emotions-all the more so for the stark counterpoint of the Yugoslav civil war.

Last Christmas, in the wake of Saddam Hussein`s invasion of Kuwait, the world contemplated a heavily armed bully astride its principal repository of oil. Crude oil prices were three times what they are today and promised economic dislocations far beyond those we have seen. Then, there really was a depression in the offing.

So persuasive was the logic of exercising some sort of police power in the Persian Gulf that it became not just the U.S. that undertook the use of force to roll back Iraq, but the United Nations, after not very many weeks of debate.

It is untellably sad that an enormous number of Iraqi soldiers died in the war. But compared with the enormity of the casualties in the eight years of war between Iran and Iraq that preceded the brief conflagration of Operation Desert Storm-and compared, too, with the dreadful prospect of a Mideast atomic war with Israel-was there any realistic alternative to the war? Probably not. The taking of young men`s lives is a terrible thing, but there are more terrible things-several of them that were in immediate prospect last year at this time.

But isn`t Saddam Hussein still in power? Yes, but this also is a reason for hope. In the new ''monopolar'' world, in which the United States alone asserts superpower status, the UN mandate to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait carried with it enormous moral force.

Had George Bush seized the opportunity on Day 14 to take off on a wild cowboy ride to Baghdad without a UN mandate, all the careful preparation of consensus in the months preceding the war would have been thrown away-and with it the precedent for exercising the international use of force in the future. The gulf war thus was a reassuring first step toward a world built on the rule of law.

In the case of GATT, it is the long-run prospect that is even more promising. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, with its obscure lingo and arcane epochs (this is the Uruguay Round, because it began in talks in Montevideo six years ago), is the cousin of the post-World War II

international institutions that facilitated the greatest sustained boom in history.

The World Bank, which lends to poorer countries for development, and the International Monetary Fund, which coordinates and counsels the financial system, get more ink. But it is GATT, with its barely 100 staffers in Geneva and led by its low-profile director general, Arthur Dunkel, that has made a difference by patiently negotiating away barriers to trade.

As a writer for the Financial Times of London put it earlier this fall,

''This framework, not spending on armaments, enabled the West to win the Cold War; it, not a now non-existent international monetary regime, has underpinned the Western world`s prosperity; and it, not development assistance, gave the most dynamic developing economies their chance. The GATT may be technical. The GATT may even be obscure. But it determines the livelihood of billions.''

The Uruguay Round has been in trouble, at least to judge from the pronouncements of the ministers working ever-longer hours in Brussels and Geneva in an attempt to produce some kind of tentative agreement before they go home for the holidays.

Words like ''breakdown'' and `impasse'' have been bandied about ever-more freely. Despite the talk, a 500-page final draft of a treaty went to the printers Friday.

Yet even if the United States and Europe could not agree on all the cuts in farm subsidies that the United States wants so badly; even if phasing out the Multi-Fiber Agreement takes longer than had been hoped; even if all 20 key areas in the intellectual property section are not resolved; even if impediments to expansion in trade in services such as banking and

telecommunications are not removed, the talks will have been a success. Ministers can return to Geneva Jan. 13 for a final round of horse trading before they take the newest release of the treaty home for ratification.

But the marathon Uruguay Round has changed GATT forever. No more can it be the low-profile agency with the funny name. In the future, it must own up to the fact of being, along with the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF, part of the sturdy fabric of a suitably loose but effective world government.

What is needed in the circumstances is a new president for GATT, a person of unmistakable stature to compete for attention with the likes of the retiring Javier Perez de Cuellar of the United Nations, Jacques Delors of the European Community, Lewis Preston of the World Bank and Michel Camdessus of the IMF.

Who better than Carlos Salinas, who has made an economic miracle of the first order in Mexico. He is constitutionally prohibited from running for re- election in 1993. Yet he is already a world figure of enormous stature.

So look across the valley of recession to the highly promising peaks beyond. The world left the 1970s on the brink of pandemonium. It is moving into the 1990s in better and better shape.